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Author
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Topic: Cattle Queen of Montana (1954)
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted December 09, 2010 08:08 PM
”Why you no tell me Niles making prints?! We go town now: STOP THEM!”
Cattle Queen of Montana (1954, Niles Films, 5x400, Sound, Color (-oh what Color!))
There are folks out there that will sincerely tell you that there have never, ever been feature films sold on Super-8. Most of ‘em have never seen a reel bigger than 400 Feet and in many cases not even one sound film.
I know this because I used to be one of them!
Back in 2000 when I returned to 8mm after a decade away, I learned a lot. They’d invented this whole Internet…Thing in the meantime and it was possible to learn a huge amount about many obscure topics and muckle onto obsolete hardware as easy as buying groceries. This is ideal country for a fan of 8mm film to live in!
So I bought some films and cameras, found out about the British 8mm scene and bought a sound projector, and bought a ton more films!
I also learned that not only did feature films exist there were hundreds of them.
-I wanted one! (-or maybe several.)
One day Cattle Queen of Montana was on E-bay un-bid and roughly the price of a VHS. It was a “Why not?” moment. It showed up a few days later and all of a sudden I needed a second sound projector.
-and that’s the story of my first Super-8 feature!
The story is your Classic Saturday Afternoon Matinee kind of Western. There are Good Guys and Bad Guys and by and large it’s pretty obvious who they are from the start (unlike real life…). Ronald Reagan is there as a good guy masquerading as a bad guy, but they don’t keep us in suspense too long about him. The Major Good Guy is a Gal in this one. Barbara Stanwyck plays a cowpoke fresh up from Texas whose cattle git’ rustled and her Pa’ gits’ shot by the Bad Guys right in the middle of the first reel, and then they jump their claim to boot!
No movie is a Western without “Injuns”, and this one is no exception to the rule. There are Good Injuns and Bad ‘Uns. The Good ‘Uns help the Heroine out after the Bad ‘Uns steal all her cows. Whenever the Bad ‘Uns appear on screen there is that classic Movie Injun Trombone Riff, and the Bad ‘Uns speak Movie Injun “English”. (“Me go when Sun stands high. Savvy?”).
There are Big Skies and Hosses and Fellers in big hats a-walkin’ with their knees bowed out and six guns draggin’ their pants down on one side! (-Whole Lotta Shewtin’ too!)
If this is a formula film, they used the whole Chemistry Set! (-everything but a showdown, a saloon fight and a kindly Madam named “Miss Sally”!)
In the end, the difference between Right and Wrong here is marksmanship. Fact of the matter is that the Heroine, her Presidential Friend and the Good Injun prevail not because they are good and the bad guys are evil, but simply because in the last reel they either shoot, tomahawk or put an arrow in every last bad guy.
Barbara Stanwyck gets her land and cattle back. Ronald Reagan gets Barbara Stanwyck. The Good Injun becomes Chief!
Niles' print of this is one of those we all have that’s not good enough to show to a crowd, and not bad enough to use for tying up newspapers on recycling day either. It kind of hangs midway in between. The sound is OK, kind of muddy here and there. The image runs from sharp to softish.
The Color…oh the Color! The outdoor scenes tend to be a little bleached out looking, and here and there the color turns shades that they would have spent hours watching in the late ‘60s. When I first got the film I thought it was just another faded print. However, If you look at certain scenes like evening ones the color is fine. Also during daylight scenes where there is a fade to or from black there are brief milliseconds where the color is great before the fade ends and we are back to bleached-out. So while I guess there must be some fading, I suspect this was never a great print. Given what they cost new, somebody must have been pretty torqued-off about it!
Somebody that understands commercial print production better than me can explain this better, but it’s as if to get the evening scenes to be anything but black they had to “overexpose” the day scenes slightly.
It’s a shame: this is a Technicolor movie and with the great scenery it must be quite an eyeful as it was meant to be seen. It’s still very watchable, but you just know it should have been better.
So this is one of those second-string prints you watch by yourself or among the enlightened ones. It’s still entertaining, but not a good example of what Super-8 can do, especially in front of an audience containing skeptics!
The End
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Panayotis A. Carayannis
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 969
From: Athens,Greece
Registered: Jul 2008
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posted December 11, 2010 04:05 PM
I am amazed at such a fade. If there were any excellent Niles prints,those Benedict Bogeaus films were,(at least ,originally). After all those years of p.d. films and dupes, Niles did manage to strike a contract with Bogeaus or whomever owned his films, and release fine copies from the original negatives.From what I own and/or have seen,they are turning reddish, more or less, but fading almost completely ?????
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